Restaurant Critic Attacked by Fancy Coffee Machine

Fancy coffee machines make great gifts, because they have levers
and nozzles. They are also deadly. New York Times restaurant critic
Frank Bruni found this out the hard way when he traded in his trusty Mr.
Coffee for something called a Chemex, which just sounds
evil. A wild-eyed, possibly sleep-deprived Bruni explains
what happened next:

I’ll say this for crusty old Mr. Coffee
and his shinier, snazzier progeny, which I kept using long after any
self-respecting epicure was supposed to: None of them ever spat scalding
liquid into my eye.

The Chemex glass coffee maker did. It’s
a one-piece carafe/cone combo, fetchingly shaped like an hourglass and
fully vetted by the coffee cognoscenti, who assured me that it would ask
for just a modicum of extra effort and answer that with coffee bliss.
Into its upper half a multilayered paper filter is supposed to be tucked
delicately, emphasis on the delicately. I did so hastily and clumsily,
and then carried my clumsiness over to the arrangement of coffee grounds
and pouring of hot water, and suddenly there were bubbles and a geyser
and ... yowza! My right eye burned and shut tight, and a dark future as
an abashed Cyclops stretched before me.